


Stranded Together

by subobscura



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, First Time, M/M, Post-Star Trek Beyond, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 20:49:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7729222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subobscura/pseuds/subobscura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of the seismic events on Altamid and at Yorktown, Jim and Bones struggle to redefine their relationship after all their barriers have been stripped away. They can't go back, but how will they ever move forward?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranded Together

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first foray into this fandom, and a first draft at that, so please be kind. I plan on a series of linearly connected but self-contained one shots that start almost immediately after Jim is pulled into the hive ship by Spock. Star Trek Beyond is pretty essential viewing and there be spoilers for everything ever herein, as well as the EU comics. This part pre-slash and heavy on the h/c, but the series will be romance. Without further adieu, I'm posting before I can psych myself out of it. Enjoy!

Stranded Together

 

Jim's flat on his stomach and naked as the day he was born, lying on a table in some anonymous Yorktown clinic. He's not familiar enough with the station to even be exactly certain where they are, which arm of the station they're on. Though he supposes it's one of the earth-like rings, because the gravity feels like home. 

And this feels like old times too, Bones picking glass out of his back and hair and calves and hands, because he can't treat any of Jim's other injuries until Jim can lay properly on the biobed and the diagnostics can run through their sequence without alarms shrieking in aggravation that Jim isn't cooperating. Which he is, dammit, even if it's mostly because his body seems to have finally revolted against the abuse he's put it through the last two days.

He's floating in that nebulous place between sleep and wakefulness. He can feel Bones' old-fashioned forceps digging in and pulling each splinter out one sliver at a time, but where the pain should be there's a disconnect and an empty lack. Jim knows he's physically in agony, like that time Finnegan's lackies threw him through the antique glass window at the Midshipman, or the other time he was in a rented shuttle accident on spring break, but then as now, Bones had sighed and hypoed him with one of the few analgesics that work with Jim's weird physiology and then gently helped (carried) Jim to the table, and settled to the hours-long process with infinite patience and minimal complaining. 

This is a basic procedure that can be done by any medic, and Bones is a federation-renowned surgeon, but Bones is Jim's universal constant. He won't let anyone else touch Jim unless he's triaging and absolutely discovers he can't be two places at once.

"Just a few more, Jimmy," Bones murmurs, and shit he must look like hell, because Bones doesn't bring out the diminutives unless he's really scared or really drunk. And Bones doesn't practice medicine drunk. He might play at being a country doctor, put on a false image of homely modesty when the situation calls for someone less intimidating than Starfleet's best flight surgeon and frontier medical diplomat, but he takes his responsibilities seriously.

His long fingers comb gently through Jim's hair, then ghost over the skin of his neck, down his arms and back and legs, like water over the rocks of a streambed. His diagnostic padd can track down every last molecule of transparent aluminum, but Bones believes in the power of human touch to heal. It's intimate and warm and caring, the closest thing Jim's had to sex since before the warp core. Jim wants to be turned on, but he's floating in space and too fucking exhausted. He hmmmms in response instead, his face half smashed into the biobed.

"Easy there," Bones whispers, running his hands over Jim's flank in slow circles, like he's an injured racehorse. "I think we'll just throw the dermal regen blankets over you," he muses, thoughtful. "They're a little less powerful, so it'll take longer, but it'll be easier on you than trying to heal all these lacerations individually. That okay with you?" He settles his thumb back at the base of Jim's skull, rubbing small circles into Jim's nape, easy and careful, like Jim will break when it's far too late for that anyway. It's nice.

Jim does what needs to be done when he's the only one capable of doing it, but he's well and truly sick of these violent confrontations with psychopathic aliens. Bones would probably say something about how he's recapitulating childhood trauma by purposefully seeking out these encounters, but Jim has never enjoyed being a human punching bag, particularly when he's hopelessly outmatched. He likes the fighting, when it's on his own terms, but not the hurting. Not anymore.

"'Kay," Jim slurs, not really registering the question. His part in the action's over, they don't immediately need him for anything, and besides, he has nothing else to give. His body is becoming one with the bed. He slips into hazy warm darkness, the sound of Bone's soft drawl lulling him to sleep and his fingers leaving tender ghostly impressions on Jim's skin.

\----==*==----

Jim floats. Minutes (hours?) later, he surfaces, slow like he's coming up from a deep water dive and decompressing to avoid the bends. There's nothing, and then he blinks and Bones is hovering over him, an apologetic frown creasing his heart-shaped face. Jim loves that face, those eyes. There's no one else in the universe he'd rather wake up to, he thinks, and blinks at the level of honesty in his internal monologue. Jim normally spends a lot of time and effort lying to himself when it comes to Bones. The monitors from the biobed blip in the background, quiet and unintrusive

He's on his back now, wearing white Starfleet issued patient scrub pants, and this is very familiar. Bones, and a hospital bed, and scrubs and it's just like the miserable days and weeks and months he spent in Starfleet Medical after Khan, sometimes writhing and hunched in pain while every cell in his body replaced itself from the inside out. He doesn't like to think about it, doesn't like to think about how he's a completely different person from Before at a molecular level and how he's probably not even entirely human anymore. Maybe the last two-almost-three years were a dream and he's still there, caught in the wake of Khan's magnetic, apocalyptic thrall.

"Easy there, Jim," Bones whispers, his hands steady and large against Jim's cheeks. He thumbs away tears Jim hadn't even known he was crying, and Jesus he is fucked up. "You're having a reaction to the sedative I gave you to fix up your back. Don't worry, for once it's completely normal."

"Oh," Jim sighs. Oh, and yeah, now that he thinks about it, he feels pretty stoned. "S'the crew," he croaks, licking his dry cracked lips, because that's always the most important thing anyway. One of Bone's hands returns to spoon crushed ice into Jim's mouth, and Jim lets it melt on his tongue, the cold bringing him further into wakefulness. He feels like he's reached the end of a marathon in a parched desert, and swallows the water like he's finally reached an oasis of calm.

Bone's eyes turn glassy, like he's two seconds away from crying himself, and that makes Jim feel like a heel in a kind of drifty way, though he's not sure what he did to make Bones cry. His chin wavers, but then firms up, and he's still the same battle-tested soldier that's fought at Jim's side for years.

"Every single person who made it onto the Franklin survived the crash landing into the city center, sir," Bones reports. "A lot of bumps and bruises, and Ensigns Plovik and Yara are in serious but stable condition from crash-related injuries." Bones is hiding behind ranks, which is never a good sign because it means he's sad or angry, rank formality having failed the two of them almost from the beginning of this mission. And Bones'll probably have to repeat all this again later when Jim isn't high as a fucking kite, but he appreciates being humored. "Captain," he swallows. "Jim." And he takes Jim's hands, but Jim can't brace himself for the emotional impact of whatever Bones is going to say next, because everything is fuzzy and distant and sliding through his fingers like sand. "Final tallies are that we had over an eighty percent casualty rate, almost all of them fatalities. The reconnaissance and recovery crews are reporting almost 100 percent odds of survival if you made it to the surface in an escape pod, but the combined effects of Krall's weapons and explosive decompressions and the swarm meant that so many of our people never even made it to escape pods, and if they did, many of them didn't make it to Altamid's surface." Bone's face is lowered, and he's staring at their joined hands while he debriefs, and Jim can tell he's crushed under the weight of his grief the same way Jim is. Jim wonders if any of his department survived excepting Bones himself.

Jim sobs once, and turns his face into the pillow, and this is what he never allows the rest of the crew to see. Their beautiful ship, their home is destroyed, they're impossibly far from earth on the edges of known space, and most of their family is dead. How can Jim do anything but cry? It feels like the most profound failure of his life, second only to the loss of Vulcan, never mind that he doesn't know what he could have done differently.

"Oh Jim, baby, don't cry," Bones whispers, dismayed, and now Bones is leaning over the bed and gently wrapping one arm under Jim's head on the pillow and the other carefully over his chest. But Bones is crying too, so the effect is somewhat muted. "We saved the survivors, and the Yorktown amazingly reports not a single loss of life, civilian or Starfleet. You did good, kid," he rumbles against Jim's temple, with a brush of lips that's almost -but-not-quite a kiss. And this? This painful honesty and physically demonstrative moment they're having means here's something else on the cusp- they're going to change or they're going to break, but their friendship isn't going to be what it was before either. Too much has happened.

Jim sniffs wetly in what he's sure is a deeply unattractive way, but Bones has seen him at his worst. Bones has seen him dead, and instead of letting him go, he stormed the Bastille and dragged Jim back into life. Everything becomes relative in the face of that kind of overwhelming love. He reaches up and cups Bones' jaw in his hand before sliding it down to rest on his shoulder. 

"I thought you were dead, you know" he rasps. "You and Spock and Nyota. All of you. There was a moment when I was ready to kill Kalara in cold blood, because she'd lured you to your deaths. I was inches away," he growls, tightening his fingers against the grain of Bone's five o'clock shadow. He's staring into Bone's eyes now, mesmerized by the wash of green and gold and brown. Jim had truly believed he might never see those beautiful eyes again, or the beautiful soul to whom they belonged. Jim lowers his gaze, ashamed. "In that moment, I understood Khan in a way I never thought I could. If you really were dead, I don't think there's a thing that would have stopped me from burning that planet to ash." Jim presses his thumb over Bone's lips, and it's shockingly intimate. They're not like this, this isn't what they do with each other. But all those barriers that had seemed so important, that kept them forever in each other's orbits but always out of reach, they're all gone now. They seem so insignificant compared to the immediacy of here and now. "If *you* were dead," he repeats, placing the emphasis where honesty dictates. Bones' eyes darken with some nameless emotion and he stills but he doesn't tighten up or pull away. 

Then Jim pulls his hands back to dig the heels of his palms into eye sockets. "Christ, Bones, what the fuck did you give me," Jim groans. "No more talking until this is out of my system. I've already said too much." His wires are getting crossed and he's getting confused about when now is and he needs to shut the fuck up.

Bones' face tightens with anger and for a second Jim can see him working himself towards a righteous rage, but then surprisingly the impulse passes and he's just Bones again, exhausted and bruised and compassionate. "I don't think we've said nearly enough," he sighs. "And that conversation is coming whether you like it or not," he scowls, but then ruins the sting of words with a gentle kiss to Jim's temple that has Jim tearing up again. "But you're right. Now isn't the time or the place, and it's not right to do it when you're at such a comparative disadvantage." He kisses Jim's temple one last time, then sits up, disengaging from Jim completely. Jim tries not to let the loss show on his face.  
Bones straightens his shoulders and glances down, seeking that inward calm as he retreats back into the professionalism they both need right now. 

He scrubs his hands over his face, and Jim can see the fine tremor that's starting to set into his fine surgeon's fingers. It's easy to forget that out of all of them, Bones has been racing flat out for going on three days, and he's desperately in need of a shower and a meal and sixteen hours of uninterrupted sleep. "Now," he frowns, "as for what your goddamn fool theatrics did to you, aside from taking another thirty fucking years off my life. I had to reduce that shoulder that loves to fall out at the slightest provocation, heal the laryngeal and tracheal damage from you getting throttled by yet another despotic alien with delusions of grandeur, not that I don't understand and empathize with the impulse, and you're going to be spending plenty of quality time with this facility's osteo-regen units for the ribs and clavicle you broke *again* falling into the fucking transporter pad *again*, not to mention your right orbital and zygomatic fractures, numerous sprains and strains and other assorted fractures, presumably courtesy of Krall. Oh and not to mention the fucking stab wound in your arm that you failed to disclose." The words are right, but Bones looks hollowed out and sad and the tone is a lot less vehement than usual. "Sometimes I think I should just pre-reserve a bed for you, wherever our next destination is gonna be."

"Job security," Jim says tightly, gritting his teeth as various parts of his body check in, and he realizes that yes, he's in a fuck of a lot of pain.

"Well my fondest wish is to retire and hopefully never have to stitch your hide back together again, even one more time you suicidal infant with the self-preservation instinct of a damn lemming," Bones snaps, and yeah, things are still pretty fragile, but Bones is calling him derogatory names again which is always a good sign. Things might turn out okay. And Jim is grateful that despite everything left unsaid, Bones is an amazing friend and such a good doctor and he's still trying to be what Jim needs even when the entire world has fallen to pieces around them.

"You're just mad I made you fly that alien shuttle," Jim huffs, already sliding back towards that in-between place. "And don't think we're not going to talk about how much time you've obviously been logging in the flight sim labs with Sulu and not telling your Captain."

"You're goddamn right I'm pissed," Bones snarls, but he's pulling the blanket up to Jim's shoulders and whatever else he says is swallowed by the darkness.


End file.
